Spelunkers R Us: Heretics’ Grave

An adventure by Daniel Herz, level 3
Written for Swords & Wizardry
   As a disclosure note, I received this as a free review copy from Stromberg Press. I've given good reviews to Stromberg titles before, and as you'd expect, this one has top-notch art and layout. That's not what I ever rank, but a very pretty product, even so.
   In my active and rambling youth, I spent many a day out in the wooded foothills of my Northern Alabama home, both with friends and alone. I’ve had slips, falls, and treacherous climbs. I’ve encountered venomous snakes, bears, and deer in rut. I’ve even done multiple rock wall climbs, free or with guide ropes. In all those many hours, there are only two times when I’ve been in genuinely life-or-death situations, and both times were when someone decided to go spelunking in our karst caves. It’s crazy how dangerous caving can be, and yet in D&D we treat clambering around underground as routine. “Just toss the thief and some rope at it.”
   Not so here, we’re in a real cavern this time. Heretics’ Grave is all about caving, devoting its first two post-preamble pages to rules and tables for climbing and descending slick natural cave slopes, wedging through tight and confined tunnels, and crawling through 2’-wide entrances. Then the end of the product has two pages of diagrams for how torchlight propagates up and down cervices and cracks. This is some deeply focused detail-oriented rules-making and I am here for it. Plus, it’s terrifying.
   So outside of a hyper-realistic ruleset, what’s the point of this module? Well, it’s a twenty-one page adventure site, mostly single-column text, focused on a cave designed initially to connect one location to another (the author says it was used to bypass an enchanted castle’s thorn wall, classic). The titular heretics were some knights who hid down at the bottom of the caves and then died, and then rose as ghouls, like you do. Add in an exiled wererat and plenty of creepy-crawlies and you’ve got a dungeon filled with nasty dangers that should fill one to two sessions with its fourteen keyed main areas (many of which have sub-sections, a/b/c, etc). 

​   Natural cave maps are always an interesting choice for a dungeon map, and it doesn’t get much naturally than these. The odd splatter of passages, the way things tumble all over each other and slop up and down wildly…good luck using a player mapper here, and I hope even as the GM you’re equipped with dot-matrix paper to map on instead of square grids. This module doesn’t just color-code the top-down map, but also gives side-view cutaways for each section to show elevation changes, which is great. Despite how noodly it looks, it’s pretty linear. Given the whole site exists as an A-to-B shortcut function, the linearity is the point and very realistic, too. Grappling with the complexity here is part of the point, but it will be a hassle. 

​   As soon as your players walk into the caves, they are most like greeted by the dwarven wererat who makes the caves his home. Not a particularly threatening combatant, he’s supposed to be friendly-but-paranoid, and plans to treacherously murder any PC he can isolate. Utter crapsack of a person, which is a fun (if predictable) interactable character. Sadly, the ghouls aren’t given any interactive business, just being a bunch of chomp monsters. It’s fine, but kind of a waste considering the rare benefit of ghouls is their sentience. Everything else to fight is either vermin or Magical D&D Monster (like darkmantles).
   Your party’s thief is going to be shining like the sun, down here with all these climb checks, so I guess its fine that there aren’t a lot of traps or locks to bump in to. Hazards are a little repetitive, mostly slipping, falling, or slipping while falling…which is fair, but I do feel like a little more secret passage stuff could be finagled. The only locked “doors” are a few areas where the wererat wedged shut things leading to his various caches. Which are then junky.
   Players are often groaning when they hit natural caves not because of the difficulty in mapping them, but because the treasure is often crappy. There’s an uninspiring collection here, mostly in the wererat’s little hiding places (muddy), amidst the rusting armor left by the ghoul-knights (muddy) and a single golden goblet worth $1,400 as the very end in a pool (wet). It’s a level 3 location, so the paucity of magic items is defensible, but it’s a little sad. I do like the little twists on a couple of them…there’s a bedtime story scroll that acts like sleep with no save but presumably takes longer to read, and the heretics had a +1 shield that interferes with that one particular god’s clerics casting spells within thirty feet of it. Amount of cash is fine, it just feels sodden and rusty.
   I can see using this thing in my game. As adventure sites go, it’s placeable darn near anywhere just as a cave system anywhere you have limestone, but its even better as a method of bypassing other paths, which is the original use case. A lot of rule-work needs to go in at the beginning but it’s an extremely realistic and gameable take on spelunking.
   *** for most uses here, but I could easily add another star if you’ve got a specific need for this environment as a gameable bridge between locations. Good job on this one.